Biology professor Heidi Elmendorf has built a career around studying parasites and infectious diseases such as malaria. But her recent research has shifted concentration onto a more pleasant focus -- her own students.

In the biology department, scholarship is moving from the lab and into the world with a project that places undergraduates in a Washington, D.C., public high school to teach students about science. Elmendorf helped launch the project and now acts as a mentor to the undergraduates.

"It takes a certain kind of student to do this," Elmendorf says, recounting the hours outside of class that Georgetown students fill planning lessons and creating teaching aids. "They end up coming up with the most creative, innovative teaching ideas, and all of them take their commitment to this program very, very seriously."

Elmendorf's work not only intensifies biology learning at Georgetown and in the District, it also addresses a valuable theme in higher education: How does teaching her students to educate others make her a better instructor -- and what does that mean for teaching techniques university-wide?

What Elmendorf does know is that her students deepen their knowledge of biology when they're faced with the responsibility of teaching others.

"They're not just learning more about photosynthesis because they're teaching about photosynthesis," she explains. "They're learning about how you think about photosynthesis and the richness of your knowledge around it and how you contextualize that knowledge."

It's a familiar process to Elmendorf, who began her work in laboratory research and transitioned to teaching at the high school level before coming to Georgetown in 1999. There is a moment for all teachers -- including her student teachers -- when they realize the satisfaction of putting their knowledge to use, she says.

"They learn something about what they can do with their knowledge," Elmendorf says. "What they've worked hard to learn is something they can use in their community."

A Different Thesis
The teaching project is one of the senior thesis options available to undergraduate biology majors. Eight students are selected for the program each year, and more than 30 have participated in all. Teaching-thesis students spend a year conducting twice-weekly lessons at McKinley Technology High School in northeast D.C.

The program touches one of Georgetown's core values: sharing university resources with the greater community, Elmendorf says.

"I felt this was the right option for me because teaching and medicine really complement each other," says Kristen Corey (C'08), who is interested in a career in health care. "If you're going into medicine, you really have to always be learning and be able to teach others what you know. This is different than just pure science. It's really the overlap of science and pedagogy."

Thesis students' work starts in their third year with a class taught this year by Elmendorf and Susannah McGowan, assistant director for curriculum design at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS). The students learn how to structure effective lesson plans, how to assess work and how to set learning goals.

"We're getting them to think about teaching in a reflective, rigorous way before they go into the school," McGowan says. "It really helps them think about how to help high-school-level students learn science best."

The teaching-thesis students parlay their newfound knowledge into action the following year in McKinley classes. Through it all, the undergraduates are not only teaching biology lessons, but also examining larger issues in science education. Each must develop and research a topic in teaching and learning, using personal experiences as a guide.

Sara Bristow (C'07), for example, studied how students' individual learning styles may call for distinctive assessments in grading -- a project born out of the realization that Bristow and her teaching partner had wildly different learning styles. The research included a survey evaluating the ways in which McKinley students learn best.

Bristow found that her own learning style may have influenced how she teaches others -- something she was able to bear in mind while creating her lesson plans.

She also discovered "a whole lot about how I learn and how to improve my study habits and become more effective," she says. "And that's not just something I can apply in science. I can apply that to any subject."

Applying New Ideas
Students' conclusions and ideas for innovative teaching techniques are shared among the thesis students, Georgetown faculty members and staff at CNDLS and at McKinley. Elmendorf uses the conclusions to assess her own students' learning, though she acknowledges it can be challenging because traditional methods such as tests and quizzes are not applicable.

"How we structure the experience so that it maximizes our students' learning about biology, in addition to making them effective teachers of it, is a challenge that we face," she explains. "It's really a question of: where do you look in their work and what sort of work do you give students that provides you with the best evidence of their learning?"

Answering that question is part of Elmendorf's own teaching and learning scholarship. Observing students plan comprehensive and compelling lessons for the McKinley classes helps the professor contemplate how she conducts her courses and assessments. She laughingly admits that she's now less likely to lecture straight through for long periods, given the thesis students' focus on hands-on learning opportunities.

Conclusions and innovations drawn from both the students' and Elmendorf's research in teaching and learning holds lessons for all those involved in the field, McGowan says.

"This project is helping us answer if students deepen their knowledge about a subject by teaching it, and because Heidi has been very scholarly and rigorous about answering that question, we're learning helpful things," she says

The science side of community-based learning specifically will get an additional boost from a new assistant director of science education, Janet Russell, who works at CNDLS.

CNDLS also is working on providing a centralized resource for faculty members interested in launching or enhancing such programs.

"The idea of community-based learning is that the community is learning," Elmendorf says, "and the community is comprised of all of us -- it's not just the people in D.C. who are learning, but it's people in the Georgetown community as well."